Reflections from Lake Three: On Fishing and Parenthood

It's the fishing!

Bait, poles, tackle boxes, licenses, life jackets…check. Drain plug? Just about every fisherman has put his boat in the water without replacing the drain plug. I’m no exception. There are lots of things to think about before we even attempt fishing, especially when taking the boat. This was to be its first time in the water this year. I’m perfectly happy bringing the tent camper and fishing from shore, but my son, John, likes to get out in the boat and fish other lakes.

As we pulled out of our camp site something was wrong, a thumping or dragging, I couldn’t quite tell. I downshifted hoping it wasn’t the transmission in our twelve-year old Suburban. No effect. We circled the small campground and parked in front of our site. A flat left rear tire. I was almost relieved…but also angry. It was the third flat for this tire, the third strike as far as I was concerned. John, impatient to fish, insisted on changing the tire, since he’d just done it a couple weeks earlier and said it would take ten minutes. He just about made it.

How had we not noticed a flat tire? We’d both walked around the truck several times getting ready. I’d mentally checked off everything I thought we’d needed from past experience and failed to notice something right before my eyes. How often does that happen? Our brains don’t readily jump from one form of thinking to another.

John said he didn’t care if we stayed at Lake Three to fish, although I knew he was a little disappointed. I just wasn’t crazy about driving more miles in the backcountry than necessary without a spare and cell service. I didn’t want to turn a small disappointment into a large one. The advantage, I told John, was that we could just beach the boat when we were done and fish after dinner.

Putting the boat into the water is far easier than getting it back on the trailer. I made sure the safety clip was in so the motor would start, pulled out the choke, turned the throttle and pulled the cord once…twice…three times and it chugged to life just like it always did on the third pull, even after a year of disuse. This year I was a little surprised. Normally, I loosen the plugs in the fall and spray the chambers with WD-40 to combat the moisture of changing winter temps in the garage. This year I hadn’t done that until I asked John to do it a few days before we’d left. The reliability of this fifteen-horse Evinrude motor is not typical of the efficiency with which I run my life. Normally, mechanical things and I don’t get along. I know this is solely a matter of attitude.

Is there a right way to fish? It depends. Is there a wrong way to fish? Most certainly, many wrong ways. I’ve practiced most of them. We chugged into the small bay opposite the campground. It was a gloriously sunny day with a mild breeze, ideal for being on the water but not necessarily for catching fish. The bass would be retreating to deeper, shadier places for the day. In all the years we’d fished this lake, I’d only caught one largemouth, that one on a floating popper about seven in the morning across from the landing. Lake Three was full of small panfish that would bite any time of the day on just about anything.

I put the motor in neutral and let us drift, then put us in reverse to stop our momentum at the most centrally located spot while John dropped the anchor. I like the boat to be as stationary as possible when we dropped anchor, so there’s less anchor line out and we can stay close to where we want to be. In our case, that meant being within good casting distance of the weed lines where I knew most of the fish were.

I’d brought leeches to tempt the walleye at the much larger English Lake, though they’d not caught me a thing the year before; but I’d never used them at Lake Three. John used a leaf worm while I tried a leech. We were using bobbers, which I hoped were set at a proper depth. I slipped a hook on a snap swivel, which I knew I should not have been using. This is where we have to stop and consider. The only genuine purpose of a snap swivel is to keep your line from being twisted by spinning lures and baits. It serves no purpose with a suspended hook except perhaps to discourage fish and save the lazy, vision-challenged fisherman from tying the hook directly to the line. I’d have a better chance of catching a bass without one.

I like to catch fish, but catching fish does not motivate me to the same degree as some men I’ve fished with. I like to consider fishing being time. I like to think that time I spend fishing doesn’t count against my allotted time on earth. Catching fish is just a bonus. I don’t like to fish hard. By that, I mean changing baits and lures, tying and re-tying knots, not to mention moving about the lake until I start catching fish. I’ve seen musky fisherman standing on the bow of their boats, working their electric trolling motors with a foot pedal while they cast the shoreline over and over. Not for me. I’m perfectly content to sit watching a bobber or drifting in the breeze.

Thing is, even the lazy fisherman should pay attention to what he’s doing. That’s not too much to expect. When that bobber begins to move, you had better be ready at any instant to set the hook. That means making sure you’ve taken up the slack in your line, so you’re not pulling up line while the fish is pulling your bait off the hook. We cast as close to the weed lines as we could without getting our tackle tangled in them. Both our bobbers twitched, probably small perch. This lake was full of them, and they could sometimes steal a worm without even disturbing your line. But I was encouraged that even my leech was drawing interest. We wouldn’t set our hooks until the bobbers went completely under.

Sometimes I found my attention drifting, like the boat swinging around in the breeze. I’d set my hook only to find too much slack. The leeches were tougher than worms and harder to steal, but sometimes I lost them too. Not as often as John lost his worms. We both pulled in some small perch and let them go. They were too small to eat, and dinner was not our mission. Our mission was simple: just fishing. Sometimes we caught a scrappy little pumpkinseed, which ounce for ounce is probably the fightingest fish that swims. Around 11:30 my bobber went down again, and I set the hook. This time I had something bigger. A swirl near the surface told me what I wanted to know. Largemouth like to break the surface when they fight. After you hook a fish, you have to keep the line taut, lest the hook remove itself from the fish’s mouth. I’ve failed in that category on occasion too but not this time.

Ideally, John should have been ready with the net, which was resting under my seat. I’d had no plans to use it, and just getting the fish to the boat was victory enough for me. It was not a large fish, and I had no problem boating it. Bright green, black eyes, strong and beautiful, it struggled little while I hastened to remove the hook and return it uninjured to the water.

“Wow,” I said to John, “in the middle of the day…on a leech.” I was feeling pretty good about myself, catching a bass on a leech, snap swivel and a bare hook while the sun was high. I was just lucky. I wished it had been John. I desperately wanted him to catch a bass instead of the worm-robbing panfish we’d caught there for years. “Want a leech?” I asked. He declined.

We moved the boat a couple of times after that and to give my neglected Evinrude a rare run. We battled the panfish for another 2 ½ hours and didn’t catch another bass. We decided to beach the boat in case we wanted to give fishing another try after dinner.

Between building a fire and fishing after dinner, John chose fishing. That was alright with me. The dwindling twilight offered another chance to catch a bass. We chugged the boat slowly over to the first place we’d anchored that morning. It wasn’t long before another small bass nailed my leech. I was having great fun, but not as much fun as if it were John catching the bass. That’s what I wanted more than anything. Minutes later another bass slammed my leech, and this one was larger and stronger. He broke the surface and tail-danced briefly on the water. Seeing a bass break the surface is probably the biggest thrill I’ve had fishing. He fought me hard but was no match for my line, and I netlessly boated him as well. John said he was about the size of the one he’d caught at English Lake last year by himself. I was at least glad for that, that he’d caught a bass once, even without my help. Once again, he declined to use a leech. He caught a small crappie, and then started casting a popper to jerk across the surface like a water bug.

I lost a couple of leeches to the piranha-perch and saved the last two just in case John changed his mind. He caught another crappie on the popper, while I was losing worms until I finally cast my hook into the weeds and broke my line. I didn’t have my reading glasses, which I needed to retie my tackle, but I had brought a spare pole with a snap swivel ready to take my hook and bait. One of the few things I do right, as a fisherman. As the sun dipped beneath the trees, I hoped John would have some success with his popper, and I even tried one myself, still saving the leeches. I asked him one more time if he wanted one. No. I wondered why. My macho son was 6’4”, 210 pounds, and was going to be 20 that week; I was sure he wasn’t squeamish about leeches. I knew he’d love to catch a bass, and the panfish were beating the bass to his worms.

After we retrieved my broken tackle from the weeds, I misplaced the hook while re-rigging the spare pole. I’m not sure I misplace things any more now that I’m 57 than when I was a kid, but now it aggravates me more. Of all things, a hook. How stupid! It could be found in a variety of wrong ways. One of the things I find most difficult fishing is controlling my temper. When I fish, Murphy, that bastard, rules. Decades of past aggravations bubble to the surface, tangled lines, stray hooks, poked fingers, lost fish. The labeling process begins: I am a hopelessly bad fisherman. A hopeless individual. I can’t do anything right, and so on. On this occasion I tried to choke this back. Setting an example for my son, who also has a temper, was one of the non-fishing objectives of this trip. I found myself losing it a little. The burgeoning darkness was not helping me locate the hook. Senile old fart. Finally, I found it sitting atop my tackle box. Just another example of the need to pay attention while fishing. Paying attention to your line and tackle is just as important when it is out of the water as in.

Once I was finally convinced John was not going to use a leech, I used the last two and lost them. John’s line inexplicably tangled in about three different ways, and so I handed him my spare pole, which now had a popper on it. He fished while I discovered in the vestigial light that his line was a hopeless cause. Once again, that spare pole was serving a purpose, even though John was not catching anything. With the mosquitoes closing in and it soon being too dark to see, we made our way back and glided noiselessly onto the grassy shore.

We’d fished for five solid hours that day in perfect weather. It had been a good day in the boat, better and more trouble-free than most. Still, I regretted that I’d caught three bass and John had caught none. I would have given anything to reverse that. He would not tell me, even the next day when I asked, why he would not use a leech, even after he saw me catching bass. Had he been saving them for me the same way I’d been saving them for him? Had he just wanted to fish in his own way, beyond the influence of his father? I said there is, in some sense, no right way to fish. It depends on what your objectives are, what you want from it.

Our kids don’t always fish their way through life in the way we think they should. I’ve gotten advice from far better fishermen than I am, and sometimes I just wished to be left alone. I wanted John to catch fish and, mostly, to have fun, and I think he did. I think he enjoyed my catching those bass almost as much as I would have enjoyed him catching them. Taking the boat had been his idea, and maybe what we’d done was quite enough for him. I don’t know. He’s not very open about some things. I do know that when it comes to our kids, there comes a point, far sooner than we expect, when we have to let them fish in their own way. We hope they catch fish, but we also have to remember that maybe actually catching fish isn’t the most important thing in life. It’s the fishing!

For a different perspective on our little fishing trip, see my post at The Night Country.